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When Attitudes Become Form – Bern 1969/Venice 2013,” First Published in Eva Kernbauer (Ed.): Kunstgeschichtlichkeit

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When Attitudes Become Form – Bern 1969/Venice 2013,” First Published in Eva Kernbauer (Ed.): Kunstgeschichtlichkeit documenta studies #7 July 2019 *This essay is a full and slightly revised BEATRICE VON BISMARCK translation from the German original “Der Teufel trägt Geschichtlichkeit oder im Look der Provokation: When Attitudes Become Form – Bern 1969/Venice 2013,” first published in Eva Kernbauer (ed.): Kunstgeschichtlichkeit. The Devil Wears Historizität und Anachronie in der Gegenwartskunst, Paderborn 2015, pp. 233- 248. A much abridged and modified version of the text appeared as “Exhibiting Performances. Historicity Process and Valorization in When Attitudes Become Forms—Bern 1969 / Venice 2013” in: Dena Davida, Mark Pronovost, Véronique Hudon, Jane Gabriels (eds.): Curating Live Arts. or,The Look of Critical Perspectives, Essays and Conversations on Theory and Practice, New York/Oxford 2018, Provocation: pp. 29-37. When Attitudes Become Form– Bern 1969/ Venice 2013* On Exhibitionary Voguing. Editorial by Nanne Buurman I The touring exhibition was developed out of the materials from the Harald Szeemann Recent years have seen not only attempts to institute exhibition history archive, acquired in 2011 by the Getty Research as a branch of art history but also a major trend towards the restaging, Institute from his widow Ingeborg Lüscher. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to redoing, and reenactment of historical art exhibitions. Last year, for her and to special collections archivist (now instance, the Getty Research Institute put together an ambitious assistant curator for modern and contemporary art) Pietro Rigolo for sharing with me on several exhibition on Harald Szeemann’s life and work that travelled from Los occasions their insights into the process of Angeles via Bern and Düsseldorf to Turin and will reach the end of its archiving and exhibiting Szeemann’s legacy. tour in New York, featuring a meticulous one-to-one reconstruction of II See also her contribution to the catalogue his Grandfather show (1976).I In this context, the following essay by accompanying the Getty Institute’s Szeemann project: “When Attitudes become a Profession. Beatrice von Bismarck is a particularly timely contribution to the evolving Harald Szeemann’s Self-Referential Practice and discussions around exhibition redos. Originally published in 2015 in the Art of the Exhibition,” in: Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions, ed. by Glenn Phillips German, we make it available in English because it gives important and Phillip Kaiser with Doris Chon und Pietro insights into the political and economic implications of such reiterations.II Rigolo, Los Angeles 2018, pp. 249-264. Taking her cue from the observation that exhibitions are inherently temporary and performative, the art historian and pioneer of curatorial studies in Germany discusses the problems that may arise when the ephemeral character of exhibition constellations and their constantly 1 changing complex historical meanings are not taken into account. With III In the movie, editor-in-chief of Runway magazine, Miranda Priestly, demonstrates to regard to the restaging of Szeemann’s When Attitudes Become Form her new fashion-unsavvy assistant Andy how (1969), curated 2013 by Germano Celant in dialogue with Thomas ignorant she is about fashion for not being aware that the cerulean blue of her sweater was actually Demand and Rem Koolhaas at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, she chosen for her by the fashion industry, including calls attention to the historical paradox involved when a show dedicated the people present in the room, then recounting the whole genealogy of the specific kind of blue. to procedural and conceptual practices that sought to escape art market The character Miranda Priestly is modelled on objectification using strategies of dematerialization, re-materializes Anna Wintour, legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue US, known for her liking of Prada pieces. forty-four years later as a celebrity curator’s work commoditized into a signature look and lifestyle product. Playing on the title of the 2006 movie IV Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History, in: idem.: Illuminations. Essays and The Devil Wears Prada, von Bismarck’s “The Devil Wears Historicity” Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt, translated thus suggests that freeze-framing temporary exhibitions into recognizable by Harry Zohn, New York, 1968, pp. 253-264, here 261-262. brands turns them into commodities with historical patina that a younger V generation of curators may want to don like a fashionista would a vintage Michel Foucault: “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1961),” in: idem.: Language, Counter- Prada piece: to display their distinction in the hope that some of the Memory, Practice. Selected Essays and Interviews, original fabric’s historical significance will rub off on them.III ed. by D.F. Bouchard, Ithaca 1977, pp. 139- 165, here p. 161. VI Remarkably, history and fashion are interwoven not only in popular Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), in: Basic Writings of Nietzsche, culture but also in philosophical reflections. In his materialist critique of ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann, New “the whore called ‘Once upon a Time’” in “historicism’s bordello,” Walter York 1968, III, Sec 26, cited here from Michel Foucault: “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. Benjamin, for instance, calls for a revolutionary revisiting of history in 158-159. order to actualize as-yet unrealized historical claims in the presence of VII As I have noted elsewhere, Carolyn Christov- the now: “The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It Bakargiev, for instance, also appropriated elements of Szeemann’s practice (such as the evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. DIY aesthetics of the Attitudes catalogue), Fashion has a flair for the topical (…) it is a tiger’s leap into the past.”IV turning them into a sort of shabby chic. See Nanne Buurman: “With CCB. Displaying Michel Foucault likewise uses clothing as a metaphor for history, Curatorial Relationality in dOCUMENTA describing genealogy as “history in the form of a concerted carnival” (13)’s The Logbook,” in: Journal of Curatorial Studies, 5/1, 2016, pp. 76-99. For the tensions V that pushes “the masquerade to its limits”. Thus, he presents a counter- between materiality and dematerialization, model to what Friedrich Nietzsche called “the lustful eunuchs of history,” authenticity and simulation negotiated in d(13)‘s retro-aesthetics, see also Buurman: who ascetically “dress up in the part of wisdom and adopt an objective “Mediating Dematerialization. dOCUMENTA point of view” that “hides (their) malice under the cloak of universals.”VI (13) als eine post-digitale Ausstellung?”, in: Klaus Krüger /Elke Werner /Andreas Schalhorn (eds.): Evidenzen des Expositorischen. Wie in But while von Bismarck’s title stands in line with this trope of history as Ausstellungen Wissen, Erkenntnis und Ästhetische Bedeutung erzeugt wird, Bielefeld 2019 fashion, it is important to understand that—diverging from the movie—it (forthcoming). is not so much chief-curator Germano Celant who stars as the devil in her essay. By presenting a carefully patched-up version of Szeemann’s show in the Prada context, she argues, it is rather the whole curatorial constellation that is dressed up in the gown of history (my emphasis) turning the exhibition into high fashion, a trend that—incidentally— permeates large parts of the field.VII Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that those responsible for the staging even chose to copy the look of the different floors of the original venue at Kunsthalle Bern. (See Fig. 0) In their ornamentality, the herringbone wooden floor and the black & white tiles make quite a memorable and photogenic backdrop for the down-to- earth installation of the artworks that largely did without plinths, frames, or any other display structure—a gesture that was novel at the time. 2 Nevertheless, a critical reading might ask whether the patterns of the VIII In his critique of John L. Austin’s speech act theory, Jacques Derrida argued that every floors are not conceptually neglectable because the floors just happened performative speech act necessarily misfires to be in the Kunsthalle at the time, and still are. Looked at this way, because the context of an utterance can never be controlled and thus will always infect the the literalist attention to the floors could be taken as a misguided act performance. For the discussion around parasitic of mim-icry since any attempt to be faithful to the whore of history will speech acts and the constitutive failure of the performative, see Derrida: “Signature Event VIII necessarily misfire. A more generous reading, however, could see in Context,” in: Limited inc, 1988, pp. 1-23. this doubling of the Kunsthalle floors in the Venetian Palazzo an attempt IX See Nanne Buurman: “Angels in the White to draw attention to the floor as the scene of the action and as a stage/ Cube. Rhetorics of Curatorial Innocence at catwalk for artistic attitudes. Yet, it is important to note that no act of dOCUMENTA (13),” in: OnCurating, 29, May 2016, pp. 146-160, where I discuss curatorial exhibiting can be innocent, and the virginity of exhibits cannot be restored camouflage of display elements. simply by reconstructing the original setting as closely as possible.IX As X For curatorial drag see Buurman: “Exhibiting a response to “The Devil Wears Historicity,” I therefore suggest that the Exhibiting. documenta 12 as a Meta-Exhibition”, 2013 reenactment of the 1969 show could also be read metaphorically in: kunsttexte, 3, 2016, online: https://edoc. hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/18452/8042/ against the grain of its makers’ intentions as an exhibition in drag or, more buurman.pdf [23.05.2019]. specifically, as an act of exhibitionary “voguing”.x XI It was popularized (some say co-opted) by Madonna’s song and video Vogue (1990) based Voguing is a dance developed in the context of the queer multi-ethnic on Jennie Livingston’s documentary film Paris is Burning (1990).
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